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The latest lurch in global statecraft—Trump’s dissing NATO
allies then playing footsie with Vladimir Putin—leaves many scrambling to
maintain some balance. Republicans for whom the enemy status of Russia is an
article of faith are beside themselves. Democrats are running out of adjectives
to describe Trump’s behavior. And activists who have been around for longer
than the last election are wondering how to steer a steady course in the midst
of extremities.

It
reminds me of whitewater rafting on the Upper Gauley River in West Virginia,
the kind where people aren’t supposed to even get into the raft unless they’ve
had prior experience. I never paddled so hard in my life. At one point, even
our guide was tossed out of the raft; thankfully a nearby kayaker grabbed him
and returned him to us.

When
the activist and lesbian feminist writer Barbara Deming encountered Frantz
Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth,” she praised his raising the question of
balance. Fanon, involved with with the Algerian war of independence from the
French empire, was writing about armed struggle for liberation. He said a major
challenge for revolutionaries at a time of accelerating turbulence is how to
avoid vertigo, the dizziness that accompanies highly emotional events happening
around us.

Deming’s personal experience in the 1960s civil
rights movement brought that kind of challenge, she said in her reflection “On Revolution and Equilibrium.” Deming found
in the midst of turbulence that her commitment to nonviolence was steadying for
her and others. Locked up in jail in Albany, Georgia, as one of a group of
pacifists arrested for breaking the segregation laws, Deming undertook a fast
that—when I saw her in the courtroom—left her hardly able to walk. The group
won their struggle with the infamous Sheriff Laurie Pritchett.

When
I read her essay, I saw that her nonviolent commitment had a steadying ability
to lead her more deeply into her center—where, as organizer and trainer
Starhawk teaches, one source of power lies.

What does the white water mean for
strategizing?

Whichever practices we choose for self- and
group-centering, there is still the question of strategy. When paddling to keep
up with the river, it matters whether you avoid the biggest rocks and how you
handle the waterfall that lies just ahead. Black historian Vincent
Harding likened the history of his people to a river,
sometimes so placid that the current was hardly noticeable, and other times
racing at a furious pace. His metaphor helped me to see that in black history
the ability of people to make the most of the rapids was linked to the group
capacity they’d built in the quieter times.

Community
organizers know this, nurturing leadership skills and supporting group
solidarity—so that when the white water comes, the team will paddle together.
But what do we do now that we’ve already entered the white water?

Use opportunities efficiently.

We
need to choose tactics that achieve strategic goals. Venting is not enough
reason to have a demonstration. For a hundred years we can express ourselves
through one-off actions and not make a difference. Corporate executives and
politicians know that we can gather a hundred thousand or a million people
together and that we’ll go home the next day. From their point of view, no
problem.

A
politician running for office knows that winning requires more than holding a
rally and then counting the votes. To win, they need a campaign. That’s exactly
the case for activists: direct action campaigns give us a chance to win. A
campaign has a demand, a target (the decider who can yield the demand), and a
series of escalating actions that reflect campaign growth and increased
campaign militancy.

Expect attitude change.

In the accelerating 1960s, a number of white
segregationists began to accept the need for integration. In the turbulent
1930s, stoutly racist white auto workers in Michigan began to see the value of an integrated United Auto
Workers. I’ve watched patriots supporting the Vietnam War start to
oppose it and family members contemptuous toward LGBT people embrace us. A
century ago, while war and industrialization accelerated change, male
chauvinists became willing to give the vote to women.

As
the river runs faster, the big problem becomes rigidity among activists who
grew accustomed to excluding those who weren’t “in the know.” Judgment becomes
more important than effectiveness, when activists would rather be right than
learn how to unite to win.

I’m
told that increasing numbers of young people are now realizing that “the
calling out culture” was a toxic trap, creating activist groups on campuses and
elsewhere that marginalized themselves.

As a
gay man brought up working class, I am in touch with the fear that leads me to
judging, to differentiating myself from people who I expect through long
experience will keep the micro-aggressions coming. These days I rage and cry,
at home, about the professional middle-class activists whose description of
Trump supporters is riddled with prejudice against my class.

It
helps me to know that the struggle for liberation has never been about safety,
about protecting myself inside a bubble apart from the reality that is out
there. Justice is gained through campaigns confronting the reality and changing
it. Ironically, the greatest availability for change is in those political
moments when the ugly reality is most apparent, when the bigots yelled “fag” at
me and my people as we campaigned for equality.

In the midst of turbulence humans tend to “gird
ourselves for defense” instead of continually scanning for the changes in
attitude that happen around us. Then we miss opportunities to support the
changes. It helps to watch revealing films like John Singleton’s “Higher
Learning,”or listen to reformed white nationalist Christian Picciolini tell his story.

Support
growing interest in alternatives.

Most
people experience political turbulence as stressful, since it comes on top of
what can be challenging personal lives. Some respond with nostalgia for the
“good old days,” but others open their minds to an alternative vision.

The
1850s in the United States was a period of whitewater. In the turbulence
surrounding the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision, black
abolitionist Martin R. Delany published a utopian novel “Blake.” Feminists and
ecological writers famously published visions in the 1970s. We see the theme
now again in the hit movie “Black Panther.”

Alternative
visions help in vital ways. They express hope, especially needed now by those
distracted by the negativity of Trump. Visions help to create platforms for
uniting a movement of movements, an essential if we want a living revolution.
They also add significance to the new economy institutions that are being built
in our midst, the start-ups for what needs to happen after a power shift opens
the way to the new society.

In her book “No Is Not Enough,” Naomi Klein
shares the process Canadian civil society groups went through to come up
with their vision of a just Canada: The LEAP Manifesto.
They intentionally called it a “leap” to distinguish from the step-by-step
incrementalism that held many Canadian progressives in its soggy embrace.

In short,
acceleration of the pace of change opens opportunities that activists need in
order to launch mass movements. After the failure of Occupy, we’ve been in a
period of what I’ve called “low-grade depression,” a dogged determination
accompanied by a sense of helplessness and hopelessness.

Symptoms include plodding through tactical rituals (marches
and rallies) and indulgence in blaming and guilting. The choppy white water of
the river we’re traveling on invites a different orientation: to devise
creative tactics as part of ongoing campaigns that can produce wins, to invite
everyone to join whether or not they’re hip or use our favorite language, and
to plant alternatives while taking seriously the need for a vision to replace
the imploding status quo.

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